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   Greg Wilson (gvwilson@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 29-Oct-2023 00:27:40 JST Greg Wilson

   • Jon Udell

   I had an epiphany yesterday in conversation with @judell (but note: revelation is not always truth.) ChatGPT etc. are doing the same thing as GUI wrappers around command-line tools like Git: they're helping people get past the accidental (or malicious) complexity that other people have created. 1/

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     Greg Wilson (gvwilson@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 29-Oct-2023 00:27:37 JST Greg Wilson

     in reply to

     I'm still frightened and disappointed by the AI gold rush in software engineering (cf. earlier toots about how many SE papers on arxiv.org are "we threw pasta at the wall and some of it seemed to stick") but I'm no longer going to make snide remarks about the people who are using ChatGPT to help them program, for the same reason that ten years ago I stopped belittling people for using Git GUIs: my generation (plus or minus one) made the mess that makes these tools necessary. 4/4

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     Greg Wilson (gvwilson@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 29-Oct-2023 00:27:39 JST Greg Wilson

     in reply to

     Bash and SQL and JavaScript are so _arbitrary_ that there really is a role for stochastic parrots capable of translating "here's what I want in terms someone sympathetic would understand" into "here are the terse and cryptic incantations I must type to satisfy the whims of the three generations of programmers who stand between me and resetting the clock on my fridge." 2/

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     Greg Wilson (gvwilson@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 29-Oct-2023 00:27:39 JST Greg Wilson

     in reply to

     If Docker is our profession tacitly admitting that we're never going to make a serious attempt to solve the software packaging problem, ChatGPT-for-programmers is our admission that given a choice between a nation's worth of carbon emissions or letting "soft" UX design principles and methods contaminate our precious curly braces, we're burning the midnight coal… 3/

     esmevane, sorry repeated this.